Sunday, May 31, 2009

The first thing to know about World War II is that it was a big war, a war that lasted 2,174 days and claimed an average of 27,600 lives every day, or 1,150 an hour, or 19 a minute, or one death every three seconds. One, two, three, snap. One, two, three, snap.

In an effort to get our arms around this greatest calamity in human history, let's examine 10 things every American ought to know about the role of the U.S. Army in WWII.

1) The U.S. Army was a weakling when the European war began in earnest on Sept. 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland. The U.S. Army ranked 17th among armies in size and combat power, just behind Romania. It numbered 190,000 soldiers. It would grow to nearly 8.5 million by 1945.

When mobilization began in 1940, the Army had only 14,000 professional officers. The senior ranks were dominated by political hacks of certifiable military incompetence. Not a single officer on duty in 1941 had commanded a unit as large as a division in World War I. The Army's cavalry chief assured Congress that four well-spaced horsemen could charge and destroy an enemy machine-gun nest without sustaining a scratch.

2) The war affected all Americans. A total of 16 million served in uniform; virtually every family had someone in harm's way; virtually every American had an emotional investment in our Army. That WWII army of 8.5 million existed in a country of about 130 million; today we have an army of roughly 500,000 in a country of 307 million.

Still, the U.S. Army mobilized only 90 divisions by the end of the war. That compares to about 300 for Germany; 400 for the Soviet Union, and 100 for Japan.

One reason was the gradual recognition that the Soviet Union was fighting most of the German army. Another was the recognition that the United States could provide industrial muscle unlike any nation on earth, to build tanks, airplanes, and trucks, to make things like penicillin and synthetic rubber, not only for us but for our Allies. That meant keeping a fair amount of manpower in factories and other industrial jobs, while getting women into the workforce as never before.

3) The U.S. Army did not win World War II by itself. We can be proud of our role, but we must not be delusional, chauvinistic or so besotted with American exceptionalism that we falsify history.

The war began 27 months before America joined the fray. It was fought on six continents, a global conflagration unlike any seen before or since. The British had done a great deal in those 27 months to keep alive the hopes of the western democracies. Russia lost an estimated 26 million people in the war, and its military did most of the bleeding for the Allied cause. By the end of the war, there were about 60 nations on the Allied side. In Italy alone, Brazilians, Poles, Nepalese, New Zealanders, French, Italians and a number of other nationalities fought beside us.

4) The U.S. Army's role in the liberation of Europe didn't start at Normandy. It started in North Africa.

President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed that the first task was to defeat Germany, but they didn't agree on where to begin. U.S. military leaders wanted to cross the English channel and head straight for Berlin. Britain wanted to start by attacking the periphery of the Axis empire in North Africa. Roosevelt eventually sided with the British.

The initial landings occurred on Nov. 8, 1942, in Morocco and Algeria. Over the next two months, the Allies gained air supremacy and almost complete control of the seas, strangling the Axis supply line from Europe. After Africa came Sicily, then the campaign in Italy. Then came Normandy.

5) The U.S. Army for a long time after we entered the war was not very good. Part of the WWII mythology is that all the brothers were valiant and all the sisters were virtuous. War is the most human of enterprises, and it reveals every human foible and frailty, as well as human virtues: cowardice and tomfoolery, as well as courage and sacrifice. The Greatest Generation appellation is nonsense.

In the first couple years of American involvement the Army was burdened with clearly inferior equipment and commanders. Those first couple years of war required a sifting out, an evaluation at all levels within the Army of the competent from the incompetent, the physically fit from the unfit.

It has sometimes been argued that in an even fight, when you matched one American battalion or regiment against a German battalion or regiment, the Germans tended to be superior, the better fighters. But who said anything about an even fight? Global war is a clash of systems. What matters is which system can generate the combat power needed to prevail, whether it's in the form of the 13,000 Allied warplanes available on D-day; the 10:1 American advantage in artillery ammunition often enjoyed against the Germans; or the ability to design, build and detonate an atomic bomb. What matters is which system can produce the men capable of organizing the shipping, the rail and truck transportation, the stupendous logistical demands of global war.

Germany could not cross the English Channel, which is only 21 miles wide, to invade Britain. The United States projected power across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Pacific and into Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Power-projection, adaptability, versatility, ingenuity, preponderance -- these are salient characteristics of the U.S. Army in WWII.

6) The U.S. Army in WWII comprised much more than riflemen. It included, for example, the Army Air Forces, which in turn embodied the single greatest military disparity between us and our enemies: the ability to flatten 50 German cities, to firebomb Tokyo, to reduce Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ashes.

Those fleets of airplanes -- a thousand bombers at a time attacking enemy targets -- are perhaps the most vivid emblem of the "arsenal of democracy" that outfitted our military and our allies. The United States built 3.5 million private cars in 1941; for the rest of the war, we built 139. Instead, in 1943 alone, we built 86,000 planes, 45,000 tanks and 648,000 trucks.

All of this gave the U.S. Army a mobility that permitted the rapid movement and concentration of firepower. The German army relied on hundreds of thousands of horses to pull their artillery and to haul supplies.

7) The Army remained under civilian control throughout the war. When the president made the decision to invade North Africa contrary to the advice of virtually all of his military advisers, he signed the order: "Franklin D. Roosevelt, commander in chief." Harry S. Truman, not the military, made the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

8) The U.S. Army in WWII was perhaps the greatest agent of social change in the country during the 20th century. This is ironic given the inherent conservatism of the institution.

In 1939, fewer than 4,000 blacks served in the Army. By early 1944, that number exceeded 750,000, and the disparity between the avowed principles for which the nation fought and the stark, hypocritical reality of American life in the 1940s gave impetus and legitimacy to the civil rights movement. Many African Americans endorsed what they called the "Double V" campaign: a righteous struggle for victory over both enemies abroad and racism at home.

Restrictions on combat roles for black troops gradually eased; a group of fighter pilots known as the Tuskeegee airmen demonstrated the inanity of those restrictions, including assertions that black pilots lacked the reflexes to be good fighter pilots. It's hard to imagine Barack Obama elected as president of the United States in 2008 without the accelerated social change of WWII.

The Army in WWII was also an overwhelmingly male institution, and exclusively male in senior leadership roles. But the extraordinary demand for military manpower meant that women were drawn into the national workplace in exceptional numbers; it's hard to put that genie back in the bottle.

The Army was a democratizing institution, too, even though it was and remains relentlessly hierarchical. Of 683 graduates from Princeton University's Class of '42, 84 percent were in uniform by 1945, and those serving as enlisted men included the valedictorian and salutatorian; 25 classmates would die during the war, including 19 killed in combat.

9) The history of the U.S. Army in WWII is among the greatest stories of the 20th century. It ought to be taught and learned as a story, with character, plot, conflict and denouement.

John Updike wrote that WWII was the 20th century's central myth, "a vast imagining of a primal time when good and evil contended for the planet, a tale of Troy whose angles are infinite and whose central figures never fail to amaze us with their size, their theatricality, their sweep."

Two cautionary notes: first, as the British historian Sir Michael Howard warns, military history has "all too often been written to create and embellish a national myth, and to promote deeds of derring-do." Triumphalism is not the point.

Second, we should not view the present and the future through the distorting lens of the past. One residue of WWII is a tendency to narrowly define power in military terms, and to define threats in terms of traditional human enemies bent on doing ill. Climate change and our addiction to foreign oil have the potential to do more damage to American sovereignty and our way of life than anything al-Qaida can pull off.

10) They died for you. We've talked about the WWII Army as both an organism and a machine, an institution that grew stupendously, that demonstrated flexibility and adaptability. But we ought never forget that at the core of this story is suffering. The U.S. military sustained almost 300,000 battle deaths during the war, and about 100,000 others from accidents, disease, suicide. Many of those deaths were horrible, premature and unspeakably sad. One, two, three, snap.

War is a clinic in mass killing, yet there's a miracle of singularity; each death is as unique as a snowflake or a fingerprint. The most critical lesson for every American is to understand, viscerally, that this vast host died one by one by one; to understand in your bones that they died for you.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

A standard “action alert” has provided a rare glimpse inside the mind of the Shadow Party.

In a December 9th e-mail signed by “Eli Pariser, Justin Ruben, and the whole MoveOn PAC team,” the Soros front group stated: “In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it's our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back.”

To clarify, the hysterical Left believes not only that America’s oldest political party is for sale, but that George Soros has already made the down payment.

Such a view would line up with Soros’ own designs. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer (no conservative, she) quotes an unidentified friend describing the billionaire leftist’s modus operandi: “Money is just a tool for him. It’s how he manipulates a lot of things in his life.” Soros spent $18 million in his attempt to buy this year’s presidential election. Now he’s setting his sights a little lower, but his desire to “manipulate” our democracy remains.

MoveOn’s contemptuous assertion comes the weekend Democratic state party officials are to meet, interview, and potentially endorse candidates seeking to head the Democratic National Committee. MoveOn has set up a campaign urging its followers to warn party officials against electing a centrist. Such a scenario, the e-mail assures, is a political loser.

Under outgoing DNC chair Terry McAuliffe, the Party cozied up to many of the same corporate donors that fund the Republicans – drug companies, HMO's, media conglomerates, big banks, polluting industries. The result was watered down, play-it-safe politics that kept the money flowing but alienated traditional Democrats as well as reform-minded independents in search of vision and integrity. And so the Party lost ground.

Aside from Stalinist-like references to “the Party,” the most striking feature of the e-mail is its historical amnesia: it was exactly this formula that allowed Democrats to twice win the presidency.

This same blindness is displayed in an Arianna Huffington column the e-mail cites. Arianna, who ran the 2000 “Shadow Conventions” with Soros money, castigates moderate Democrats who hope the party will take its national drubbing as a signal to move rightward. She asks, “Have these people learned nothing from 2000, 2002 and 2004? How many more concession speeches do they have to give – from ‘the center’ – before they realize it’s not a very fruitful place?” Yet none of these races was run from the center: Al Gore ran his 2000 campaign on the theme of “The People vs. the Powerful”; in 2002, Congressional Democrats ran as the party that valued UN decrees over national defense and collective bargaining above airport security; and MoveOn.org, Americans Coming Together, and the full Shadow Party apparatus ran the show in 2004. Despite the formula’s proven failure, Arianna claims, “The party needs a chairman able to drive a stake through the heart of its bankrupt GOP-lite strategy and champion the populist economic agenda that has already proven potent at the ballot box in many conservative parts of the country.”

The Shadow Party again walks in lockstep on this issue. Bill Moyers’ favorite pet publication, The American Prospect, is also pushing for a more leftist party. TAP recently published an article by David Sirota that hailed diving into the Left’s fever swamps as “The Democrats Da Vinci Code.” Sirota calls for tough “us-versus-them red meat, straight talk about how the system is working against ordinary Americans.” This Bob Shrum psuedo-populism has been the touch of death to every presidential candidate who’s ever towed his rhetorical line. Nonetheless, Sirota claims this recipe is working. His proof? Socialist Bernie Sanders winning in Vermont, and über-liberal Ted Strickland carrying a safe Democratic district in economically depressed southern Ohio (which, like depressed inner cities, has been run by his fellow Democrats for a generation). Strickland, incidentally, ran unopposed this year.

Sirota also claims his advice to lurch leftward is vindicated by the success of Mississippi Congressman Gene Taylor. Sirota is right that Taylor is no moderate: he’s racked up a conservative voting record that would be the envy of many Republicans. One of five House Democrats who voted to impeach President Clinton, Taylor voted for the invasion of Iraq, earned an A-rating from the National Rifle Association, supported oil-drilling in ANWR, co-sponsored the Federal Marriage Amendment, and voted to cap medical malpractice suits. He is also a pro-life Democrat who has a zero percent voting record from NARAL. Sirota is right that Gene Taylor presents a winning paradigm for Democrats, but for precisely the opposite reasons he suggests.

The likely intended beneficiary of the MoveOn PAC’s e-mail campaign is Howard Dean, who won the MoveOn.org “virtual primary” and is actively campaigning for the DNC chairmanship on a hard-Left platform. “There's only one thing Republican power brokers want more than for us to lurch to the left – and that's for us to lurch to the right,” Dean told a George Washington University audience on Wednesday.

However, the Shadow Party’s stealth candidate is Hillary Clinton confidant Harold Ickes. Soros funded Ickes’ Media Fund and Center for American Progress. George Soros consulted with both Ickes and Bill Moyers during the campaign.

When asked why he dedicated so much of his personal fortune into opposing President Bush, Soros said, “This is the most important election of my lifetime. These aren’t normal times. The ends justify every legal means possible.” Presumably, including buying a political party. Having already “bought” the party, Soros now wants the Democrats to pick someone who will allow him to act as its absentee owner. He wants to place the party formally under the control of the Shadow Party.

“I want my ideas to be heard,” Soros has pined. If MoveOn PAC successfully influences the party faithful in choosing the DNC chair, Soros’ ideas may find a new outlet. That may represent a great return on investment for George Soros, but it would be disastrous for Democrats…and America.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

I have had it with you and your administration, sir. Your conduct on your recent trip overseas has convinced me that you are not an adequate representative of the United States of America collectively or of me personally.

You are so obsessed with appeasing the Europeans and the Muslim world that you have abdicated the responsibilities of the President of the United States of America. You are responsible to the citizens of the United States .. You are not responsible to the peoples of any other country on earth.

I personally resent that you go around the world apologizing for the United States telling Europeans that we are arrogant and do not care about their status in the world. Sir, what do you think the First World War and the Second World War were all about if not the consideration of the peoples of Europe? Are you brain dead? What do you think the Marshall Plan was all about? Do you not understand or know the history of the 20th century?

Where do you get off telling a Muslim country that the United States does not consider itself a Christian country? Have you not read the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States? This country was founded on Judeo-Christian ethics and the principles governing this country, at least until you came along, came directly from this heritage. Do you not understand this?
Your bowing to the king of Saudi Arabia is an affront to all Americans. Our President does not bow down to anyone, let alone the king of Saudi Arabia . You don’t show Great Britain, our best and one of our oldest allies, the respect they deserve yet you bow down to the king of Saudi Arabia .. How dare you, sir! How dare you!

You can’t find the time to visit the graves of our greatest generation because you don’t want to offend the Germans but make time to visit a mosque in Turkey .. You offended our dead and every veteran when you give the Germans more respect than the people who saved the German people from themselves. What’s the matter with you?
I am convinced that you and the members of your administration have the historical and intellectual depth of a mud puddle and should be ashamed of yourselves, all of you.

You are so self-righteously offended by the big bankers and the American automobile manufacturers yet do nothing about the real thieves in this situation, Mr. Dodd, Mr. Frank, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelic, the Fannie Mae bonuses, and the Freddie Mac bonuses. What do you intend to do about them? Anything? I seriously doubt it.
What about the U.S. House members passing out $9.1 million in bonuses to their staff members – on top of the $2.5 million in automatic pay raises that lawmakers gave themselves? I understand the average House aide got a 17% bonus. I took a 5% cut in my pay to save jobs with my employer. You haven’t said anything about that. Who authorized that? I surely didn’t!

Executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be receiving $210 million in bonuses over an eighteen-month period, that's $45 million more than the AIG bonuses. In fact, Fannie and Freddie executives have already been awarded $51 million – not a bad take. Who authorized that and why haven’t you expressed your outrage at this group who are largely responsible for the economic mess we have right now.

I resent that you take me and my fellow citizens as brain-dead and not caring about what you idiots do. We are watching what you are doing and we are getting increasingly fed up with all of you.

I also want you to know that I personally find just about everything you do and say to be offensive to every one of my sensibilities. I promise you that I will work tirelessly to see that you do not get a chance to spend two terms destroying my beautiful country.

Sincerely,
To every real American
P.S. I rarely ask that emails be 'passed around'.............PLEASE SEND THIS TO YOUR EMAIL LIST......it's past time for all Americans to wake up!

Friday, May 01, 2009

The following article was written by Srdja Trifkovic about how George Soros has influenced Eastern Europe after the demise of the Soviet Union.

The reason I find this article interesting is that it is hard not to draw a parallel between what Soros’ Open Society agenda has done in Eastern Europe and what Soros and his Secular Progressive soldiers are trying to, and in some cases succeded, in the United States of America.

George Soros, Postmodern Villain
by Srdja Trifkovic

George Soros was born in Budapest in 1930 but, today, spends most of his time in New York City. Not much is known about his early years. He is the only eminent “holocaust survivor” who has been accused of collaboration with the Nazis. In 1947, he managed to sneak through the Iron Curtain, and, the official story goes, “he landed penniless in London, but by hard work and sheer genius, he rose to become one of the planet’s most successful investors and richest men.”

Mr. Soros’ peculiar moral values, political views, and ideological preferences would be immaterial without the money that he can spend promoting and imposing them. The bulk of that money-currently estimated at not less than seven billion dollars-was earned in the minus-sum game of currency and stock speculation, contributing nothing to the creation of wealth and making millions of ordinary people poorer in the process. His offshore Quantum Fund-legally headquartered in Curacao, beyond U.S.-government supervision-specializes in speculative investments to take advantage of deliberately induced political and economic weaknesses of different countries and regions. In an interview with the Swiss weekly L’hebdo (May 1993), Soros outlined his strategy: “I speculate on discrepancy between the reality and the public image of this reality, until a correctional mechanism occurs, which approaches these two.”

His profits are staggering. On September 16, 1992, he famously made a billion dollars in one day by betting against the Bank of England and the pound sterling. In July 1997, he contributed to the Southeast Asian financial crisis by shorting the Thai bath. In early 2000, he supposedly suffered losses on tech stocks, but some analysts now suggest that the burn of the NASDAQ was controlled and that Soros helped to start the fire. By last November, he was betting the U.S. dollar would plummet. As the London Independent reported (November 28, 2003), his activities were contributing to a growing belief on Wall Street that the dollar would slide even further.

There is nothing new in Soros’ approach to making money or in the ability of such a person to make an impact, invariably detrimental, on his host society’s morals and culture. What is new with Mr. Soros-in addition to the implausible claim that a private speculator could get as far as he has unaided by any established financial interests-is his systematic, concerted effort to use a large part of his fortune to promote his peculiar social and political views. He does so through a global network of “nongovernmental organizations” named after himself and active primarily in Eastern Europe but also in Africa, Latin America, and the United States. At age 75, money is not his object but his tool. He has used it to develop a well-coordinated global operation centered on the Open Society Institute (OSI) in New York, which funds a network of subsidiaries in over 50 countries.

Even before the Open Society network came into being, Soros’ blueprint for postcommunist “shock therapy” reform had been put to the test. First came Poland, where the first postcommunist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, was close to Soros and subsequently remained associated with his local subsidiary, the Stefan Batory Foundation. In his book Underwriting Democracy, Soros says that he personally prepared the broad outlines of Poland’s comprehensive economic reform:

I joined forces with Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University, who was advocating a similar program, and sponsored his work in Poland through the Stefan Batory Foundation . . . The IMF approved and the program went into effect on Jan. 1, 1990. It was very tough on the population, but people were willing to take a lot of pain in order to see real change.

Poland was only a start, however; far more important to his goals was his association in 1991-92 with Russia’s “reformist” leaders Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar and their Harvard guru Sachs. Within a year of their “shock therapy,” hyperinflation had wiped out Russians’ savings and the long-suffering middle class with it. Pensioners were literally starving. The parallel “privatization” of Russia’s huge resources-timber, oil, gas, chemicals, media-created the robber oligarchs and contributed to Russia’s effective deindustrialization. The country was lowered into neocolonial dependence: a supplier of energy and raw materials and an importer of high technology and manufactured goods. Nevertheless, in early 1993, Soros felt that Russia had not gone far enough: “The social safety net would also provide a powerful incentive to shut down loss-making enterprises. Factories could be idled and the raw materials and energy that go into production could be sold for more than the output.”

George Soros is out to deconstruct nations and states as Europe has known them for centuries, with Russia always the main prize. In an interview with the Moscow daily Komersant (August 8, 1997), he declared that “a strong central government in Russia cannot be democratic.” “The rescue of a free Russian economy depends on the attraction of Western investments,” he added, and, to that end, “Russia’s general public must accept the ideology of an open society.”

By that time, a total of 29 “Soros Foundations” were active in every postcommunist country. In 1994, his foundations spent a total of $300 million; by 1998, that figure had risen to $574 million. These are enormous sums in an impoverished and vulnerable Eastern Europe.

Those foundations say that they are “dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society.” What this means in practice is clear from their many fruits. Regarding “women’s health” programs in Central and Southeastern Europe, for instance, one will look in vain for breast-cancer detection or prenatal or postnatal care. Soros’ main goal is clear and frankly stated: “to improve the quality of abortion services.” Accordingly, his Public Health Program has supported the introduction of medical abortion in Albania, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia and the introduction of manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) abortion in Macedonia, Moldova, and Russia. In addition,

OSI has also worked with international and local NGOs to respond to the growing strength of the antiabortion movement. Through its influence on ministries of health and hospital administrators, that movement has made strides in reducing access to abortion . . . OSI will continue to support training in quality of care and efforts to keep abortion legal, safe, and accessible for all women in the region.

Why is Soros so interested in promoting more abortions in Eastern Europe? Overpopulation cannot be the reason: The region is experiencing a colossal demographic collapse and has some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Unavailability of abortion cannot be the answer either: According to a recent U.N. report, five European countries had more abortions than live births in 2000-the Russian Federation, Bulgaria, Belarus, Rumania, and Ukraine. Overall, the report said, abortion rates are “substantially higher in central and eastern Europe and the CIS countries than in western Europe and North America.” The only logical answer is that Soros wants as few Russians and others born into this world as possible.

Soros’ public-health programs also “support initiatives focusing on the specific health needs of several marginalized communities” and promote “harm reduction”: “Its primary goal is to empower drug users to protect their health. Needle/syringe exchange and substitution therapies (e.g., methadone) are at the center of harm reduction health interventions.” His “harm reducers” have expanded their work with special initiatives on “sex workers” and prisoners and launched a policy initiative that attempts to ensure that “repressive drug policies do not impede the expansion of harm reduction efforts.”

Over the past five years, the Soros network has given a successful start to previously nonexistent “gay” activism in almost all of its areas of operation. The campaign for “LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] Rights” is directed from Budapest, where Miriam Molnar’s 1999 policy paper published by OSI defined the “problem” as discrimination and the low level of acceptance, visibility, and political representation of LGBT’s. It was necessary either “to convince the society to accept LGBT people as equal and let the society make pressure [sic] to the politicians (through media) to change laws” or “to convince the politicians that LGBT people are equal and that they need help in convincing the rest of the society.” The overall goals were to generate discussion about LGBT identity within the community, to make them visible and “create a positive image,” and to establish regular forums of discussion with other groups in the region. Specific tasks included the development of websites in English with subsites in local languages, the establishment of task forces that would react to all “homophobic” media outbursts in one “Pink Book,” and the organization of two-week summer schools for teachers that would “provide training about discrimination of [sic] LGBT people, disabled people, overweight people etc.”

In November 1999, a pilot project began at the Center for Publishing Development (OSI Budapest) on homosexual books in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, and Slovakia. That same year, Nash Mir (Our World) Gay and Lesbian Center announced that it had been registered as an NGO in the Ukraine. From that moment, the group was free to pursue its stated goals, including “fight against sexual-orientation discrimination” and “homophobic sentiments in societal consciousness” and “assistance to upbringing of gays’ and lesbians’ self-consciousness as equal and valuable members of society.” The group expressed gratitude for its legalization to the “Ukrainian branch of Soros Foundation Network (Renaissance Foundation) which lobbied our question in the Ministry of Justice and render [sic] legal assistance to us.”

Gay.ru is a Soros-funded Moscow NGO that has developed “into an established and recognized Russian gay and lesbian center” and “the clearing house for lesbian and gay groups scattered across the country”:

We keep contacts with all existing gay, lesbian, and AIDS organizations in Russia and maintain on-going correspondence and reporting to international gay and lesbian organizations . . . We have collected the biggest off-line library that features over a hundred Russian titles and some fifty English classic books on gay studies. It was greatly enhanced by the Core Collection on Gay and Lesbian Issues awarded to us by the Soros Foundation in 2000.

In Bucharest, Monika Barcsy of the local Soros branch bewailed the fact that, in Rumania, “the homosexual identity is stigmatized” and is one of the main bases for treating individuals as “the others” in an attitude of intolerance. Their families became the victims of prejudice “just because the society is unable to accept the legitimacy of same-sex relations as a ‘normal’ manifestation.” The author singles out the Rumanian Orthodox Church as a prime culprit: “The problem is that many Christian Orthodox students’ organizations and other student groups support the church.” In 1994, she points out, more than 100 theology students began a series of demonstrations in front of Rumania’s parliament against homosexual propaganda in the media and collected signatures demanding legislation to criminalize same-sex relations. Barcsy concludes by reiterating the standard Soros line:

Gay men and lesbians need rights that guarantee them the expression of their identity in the public sphere . . . [T]he legal status of gays and lesbians, their ability to move and appear in public, to speak out and act together should be considered a very good test of the civic openness. [It] can’t be resolved with the new laws made under the pressure of different human rights organizations. Romania needs . . . to ameliorate the negative responses towards the homosexuals from the majority population . . . There are “problems” with the society as a whole, and the society’s mentality can’t be changed overnight.

A key pillar of Soros’ activities is his dictum that “no-one has a monopoly on the truth” and that “civic education” should replace the old “authoritarian” model. Civic education does not have to be “just a dialogue” between a teacher and students, he says; in addition, “we have projects like health education, where people use new ways to discuss issues like hygiene, diet, and sex.” While “this does not sound like traditional civic education,” he continues, it is “a new way for teachers to relate to their pupils,” just as citizens must relate in new ways to governments and elected officials in societies trying to become more open and democratic.

Accordingly, throughout postcommunist Eastern Europe, the Soros Foundation’s primary stated goal is to “democratize the education system” by “instituting curriculum reforms.” What this means in practice has been demonstrated over the past three years by Serbia’s education minister Gaso Knezevic, a friend and confidante of Soros. Since the first day of his tenure, Mr. Knezevic has insisted that schools must be transformed from “authoritarian” institutions into “exercise grounds” for the “unhindered expression of students’ personalities in the process of equal-footed interaction with the teaching staff, thus overcoming the obsolete concept of authority and discipline rooted in the oppressive legacy of patriarchal past.” Mr. Knezevic started his reform with primary schools, with a pilot program of “educational workshops” for children ages 7 to 12. The accompanying manual, financed by the Open Society, rejects the quaint notion that the purpose of education is the “acquisition of knowledge” and insists that the teacher has to become the class “designer” and that his relationship with students should be based on “partnership.”

In Russia, Soros’ associates exercise great control over the selection of textbooks for Russian schools. According to a press release by the Gaidar Youth Library, financial support from the Open Society Institute provided it with computers, videocassettes, and CD’s, all of which made “special training” for the children of “underprivileged people” possible in the library:

We organized a special seminar “Children’s rights nowadays” for all specialists who took part in our project . . . The working group of the program “The Circle of Friends” is grateful to the “Open Society” Institute (Soros Fund, Budapest) for the opportunity to realize this project in a full volume.

In 1999, the Moscow Open Society office started a major five-year project, “The Development of Education in Russia.” Its goal is to “reeducate rural teachers at a cost of US $100-150 million” (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, September 19, 1998). It is also applying a program called “Tolerance” in Russian secondary schools, but its masterminds may have made a linguistic blunder. According to a Russian critic of the program,

The Russian translation of this Latin word-tyerpimost-has the dual meaning of prostitution and could be confused with doma tyerpimosti, houses of ill fame . . . How come this financial manipulator tries to teach us about tolerance, us who grew up with Leo Tolstoy, one of the first philosophers of non-violence? . . . But Mr. Soros is also a horribly distorted mirror, which should make us see our own, present image, without blinking or turning away. There are times when evil can become an eye-opener, when its derisive laughter can waken us up and help regaining our strength. We should not miss this opportunity.

A first step in that direction may have been taken last November 7, when the OSI Moscow office was raided by a private security company hired by the owner of the building with whom the foundation was engaged in a protracted legal battle. Only weeks before, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the billionaire oligarch and OSI Moscow executive director who has his own NGO called the Open Russia Foundation, was arrested and charged with tax evasion, theft, forgery, and fraud. Soros denounced the arrest as an act of “persecution” that should disqualify Russia from belonging to the G-8 group of industrialized countries. “I believe that he acted within the constraints of the law. I am doing the same in the United States,” said Soros, alluding to his multimillion-dollar donations toward “regime change” in Washington next November. The American press indignantly reported that the raid was directed against a philanthropic organization that had spent “more than $US 1 billion on charitable projects in Russia in the past 15 years.”

“Racism” is Soros’ regular obsession, but he faced the potential problem of finding it in racially nondiverse Eastern European countries. This has been resolved by identifying a designated victim group-Gypsies! “Few minority groups in Europe face as much social, economic, and political discrimination as do Romani people,” says OSI. Being a “Roma activist” has become a lucrative designation within the community. Seventy of the most promising ones came to the conference “Roma in Expanding Europe: Challenges for the Future,” held in Budapest last summer, at which Soros inaugurated a “Decade of Roma Inclusion.” The conference offered policy recommendations, some of which could have been written by Jesse Jackson: first, obligatory and free preschool education in desegregated classrooms; second, Romani assistants in the classroom, especially in preschool; third, antibias training for teachers and school administrators; and fourth, integration of Romani history and culture in textbooks at all levels.

Legally mandated affirmative-action programs for Roma in high schools and universities were recommended by the delegations of Rumania and Serbia-Montenegro. On employment, the conference recommended tax incentives for those who employ Roma and access to low-interest credit for small Roma-owned family businesses. The Czech and Slovak delegations also proposed setting aside a percentage of government contracts for Roma construction firms. In the area of housing, specific demands were made to combat “racism and discrimination,” including the “legalization” of shantytowns and “equal access” to municipal housing. The conference concluded that combating racial discrimination against Roma must be pursued through the adoption of comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation complying with the requirements of the E.U. Race Equality Directive.

The Rumanian delegation demanded that the Bucharest government recognize the Roma holocaust by issuing a public apology along with urgent adoption of a reparations package. The European Union was asked to make sure that Roma are broadly involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of all E.U. spending on Roma projects.

Soros’ “programs” would have been deemed laughable or outrageous in their target countries only a decade ago. No one is laughing today, however. For thousands of young Eastern Europeans, to become a “Soroshite” represents today what joining the Party represented to their parents: an alluring opportunity to have a reasonably paid job, to belong to a privileged elite, and, for many, to travel abroad. The chosen few go to Soros’s own Central European University in Budapest, where they are taught that affirming a scientifically grounded truth is “totalitarian” and that the sovereign nation-state is evil.

There is not one patriot (Russian, Croat, Latvian, Serb, Rumanian, Hungarian) or one practicing Christian on Soros’ payroll. In all postcommunist countries, Soros relies on the sons and daughters of the old communist establishment, who are less likely to be tainted by any atavistic attachments to their native soil, culture, and traditions. The more successful among them-and the most loyal-may spend years drifting from one “project” to another, and some have been living that way for more than a decade. Soros has revealed (in Underwriting Democracy) that his Open Society foundations will help create an international web, at the heart of which will be the computerized base of personal data that will enable Western multinationals to find the local candidates they need.

These new janissaries, just like those of the Ottoman army of old, have to prove their credentials by being more zealous than the master himself; as the Balkan proverb has it, “a convert is worse than a Turk.” Nobody is more insanely vehement in his insults against the Serbian people and their history, religion, art, and suffering than a dozen Serb-born columnists who are on the payroll of Sonja Licht, Soros’ Gauleiter in Belgrade.

Hoi polloi are force-fed the daily fare of OSI agitprop by “the Soros media”-the term now exists in over a dozen languages-from the Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw to Danas (Today) in Serbia, the Monitor in Montenegro, the Markiza TV channel in Bratislava, and Vreme weekly and the B-92 electronic media conglomerate in Belgrade. They invariably parrot Soros’ views and ambitions, reflected by the agenda of the local Soros foundation at home and, in world affairs, by the International Crisis Group (ICG), largely financed by Soros and run by his appointees.

Soros’ agenda in world affairs is clear from the fact that his appointees include Gen. Wesley Clark, who commanded NATO forces in the war against Serbia in 1999; Louise Arbour, the former chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal at The Hague; former assistant secretary of state Morton Abramowitz, an enthusiastic supporter of Bosnian Muslims and Albanians in the wars of Yugoslav succession; and former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose visceral Russophobia aided and abetted the rise of Osama bin Laden and his jihadist cohorts.

As Gilles d’Aymery noted two years ago, Soros is not just the power behind the Open Society Institute, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Crisis Group:

[L]ike an immense Jules Verne octopus, [he] extends his tentacles all over Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, the Caucasus as well as the republics of the former Soviet Union. With the help of these various groups [it is possible] not only to shape but to create the news, the agenda and public opinion to further aims which are, in short, the control of the world, its natural resources and the furtherance of the uniform ideal of a perfect world polity made in America.

That polity will not be “American” in any recognizable sense if Soros has his way, however. Here, he supports increased government spending and tax increases, drug legalization, euthanasia, open borders and immigration, immigrant entitlements, feminism, free abortion on demand, affirmative action, and “gay” rights. He opposes the death penalty in any circumstance. One of the trustees of OSI is Lani Guinier, the law professor whom Bill Clinton tried to nominate as head of the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice but changed his mind when she was found to favor minority veto power over legislation. Its president is Aryeh Neier, who had for 12 years been executive director of the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch and, before that, national director of the American Civil Liberties Union for eight years.

That he is anti-Bush is unremarkable, but Soros’ statement last December that the defeat of the President is “a matter of life and death” was silly. His largesse to Bush’s foes-although substantial-does not reflect the stated urgency of the moment: $15 million for America Coming Together; $3 million for John Podesta’s new think tank; and $2.5 million for MoveOn.org falls far short of a month’s cost of running his many foundations around the world.

Soros remains primarily committed to destroying the remaining bastions of the family, sovereign nationhood, and Christian Faith east of the Trieste-Stettin line. He senses that his full-throttle intervention in America is not necessary, because things are gradually going his way anyway. No matter who is his party’s anointed candidate come next November, the real choice will be between George and Gyorgy, and that is not much of a choice.

About the Author: Srdja or Serge Trifkovic, (born July 19, 1954, in Belgrade) is an American historian, journalist and political analyst, and (since 1998) foreign affairs editor for the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles. He is also Director of the Center for International Affairs at The Rockford Institute, which publishes Chronicles. Trifkovic is the author of the bestselling The Sword of the Prophet: History, Theology, Impact on the World, an expert on Balkan politics and a regular columnist for several conservative publications in the United States.